The tails of USAir, Northwest and American Airlines pass each other in July 2001 at ORD. (Photo by Tim Boyle)
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Ed Colodny, a towering postwar airline executive who presided over four significant mergers as he built US Airways into one of the country’s strongest regional airlines, turned 100 on Sunday June 7th.
His celebration on that day was to “relax and enjoy a martini,” Colodny said Monday, in a telephone interview from his home in Naples, Fla.” He attributes his long, active life to “good family genes and a wonderful wife and children.”
The US Airways name was lost when the carrier merged with American Airlines in 2013.
In 1957 Colodny joined Allegheny Airlines as assistant to the president and staff attorney. He was a 31-year-old lawyer, schooled in the complexities of a regulated airline industry. On his first day, he climbed the stairs to his office in Hangar 12 at Washington National Airport. “It was a very small office,” he recalled. During a 34-year career at the company, he was in charge from 1975 to 1991.
He oversaw a 1968 merger with Lake Central Airlines, a 1972 merger with Mohawk Airlines and, in 1987, mergers with both Pacific Southwest Airlines, known as PSA, and Piedmont Airlines. The latter two followed the 1978 deregulation of the airline industry. Allegheny initially opposed deregulation, but under Colodny it became one of the major beneficiaries, surviving until the last round of major industry consolidation. The airline’s name changed from Allegheny to US Air in 1979 and to US Airways in 1997.
Throughout his career, Colodny retained a reputation as an employee-focused executive, known as “Uncle Ed,” in a heavily unionized industry often characterized by bitter labor-management conflict.
“We think he is the company,” said David Castelveter, a 27-year US Airways veteran who in recent years put together and emceed five reunions for former employees, mainly from sales and marketing. “Ninety-nine out of 100 of us say he was the best CEO we ever had, the most caring CEO we ever had. He never missed a Christmas without giving us a present, either a bonus or a cheese ring or something that said he cared about us. He had this remarkable sense of family within the organization that never existed after he left. He would travel around the system, and then he would meet you and he would remember your name.”
Despite Colodny’s buildup, US Airways did not manage to survive the last round of major airline industry consolidation, which started around the turn of the century, when Delta merged with Northwest, United with Continental and American with US Airways.
In October 2015, Colodny flew on US Airways’ last flight, a redeye from San Francisco to Philadelphia as Flight 434. At 89, he endured a strenuous 24 hours of travel, originating at his home in Burlington, Vermont. “I hope the flights are on time and they have full loads,” he said at the time, in an interview for TheStreet. “It’s the end of the name, not the end of the airline as such, but the end of the name, and I just thought it would be neat to fly on the last flight. It’s for nostalgia.”
Looking at today’s industry, pressured by extremely high fuel costs due to the Iran War, Colodny is reminded of “how difficult it is. The only way to deal with that is to charge the customers higher fares.”
Asked his own worst crisis, Colodny cited a fuel crisis that began in 1990, when oil prices surged from around $17 a barrel in July to $40 in October, reflecting fears surrounding the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. “I was there,” he said. Today’s cost is around $90 a barrel.
The “good news,” he said, is that “There are a lot of good people in the industry taking care of the customers.”
As for the US Air mergers, he said, “They were all good, but probably Piedmont was the best.” While widely opposed because of the jarring mixture of southern gentility and Pittsburgh-centricity, the merger doubled the size of airline and brought the Charlotte hub, now American’s second largest hub and the third biggest single airline hub in the world.
“We got a lot of very good people and put it together,” Colodny said. “The industry aIways has some formal of external pressure that makes running it difficult. But I kept the airline strong enough to survive.”
Ted Reed co-authored “American Airlines, US Airways and the Creation of The World’s Largest Airline.”